When hats, baseball caps, visors and other accessories are not being worn, they are commonly stored in closets upon shelves, or upon hooks. The task of storing a hat on a shelf or a hook is often undertaken carelessly by one simply tossing the hat haphazardly amidst other hats, accessories or clothing. Quite frequently, such careless and haphazard storage causes hats to become folded, crushed or otherwise damaged through inadvertent contact with other objects.
Damage to hats caused by haphazard storing can be reduced by minimizing contact with the hat by other objects. For example, hats may be carefully spaced apart from other accessories and clothing on a shelf. However, providing individual shelf space for each hat often requires considerable shelf space to be consumed unnecessarily and requires time and effort to be spent carefully arranging objects on a shelf so as to avoid contact with the subject hat. Where one has numerous hats, it is usually impractical to provide and maintain separate shelf spaces to accommodate each hat.
In addition to shelves, coat hooks, normally made of metal or plastic, have long been used to store hats and accessories temporarily when not being worn. Such hooks are commonly mounted to doors, walls or free standing posts. A single hook may be used for hanging a single hat apart from other objects and thereby reducing the potential for other objects to cause damage to that hat. However, using a single hook to store one hat is often wasteful as it underutilizes the hook, which is typically capable of holding much more weight and more objects than a single hat.
To make better use of a hook, multiple accessories are often hung collectively on one hook. However, removal of a desired accessory from among other accessories stored collectively on a single hook commonly requires one to undertake an inefficient and ergonomically challenging process. For example, to gain access to a desired accessory from within a stack of multiple accessories on a hook, one is often required to remove multiple accessories from the hook. Once removed from the hook, the other accessories must be stored temporarily as by holding multiple accessories in one's hands or across one's forearms or both which often requires considerable coordination. Alternatively, one may place the removed accessories down elsewhere as on a bed or a countertop, or hang them on nearby hooks. Once the desired accessory has been accessed and removed from the hook, the other accessories must be gathered and re-hung on the hook. This burdensome process must be repeated for each accessory that is desired to be worn.
It is thus seen that a need exists for an apparatus capable of storing multiple hats or accessories efficiently and ergonomically in a small amount of space. It is to the provision of such that the present invention is particularly directed.